Shared Centers of Pooled Robots
Discussion
Carlos Perona:
"Those businesses most dependent on migrant labour are precisely often the least capable of automating on their own. Given that many farms, construction firms, hotels, care homes and other businesses in sectors that are theoretically automatable are small or medium-sized, they are likely to be unable to own high-capital robots.
Investment, I would therefore argue, should focus on shared centres with rotating-use robots. The shared centre model allows small businesses to pay for hours and installation rather than for exclusive ownership of largely idle capital. Pooling demand at the regional level should translate into fleet discounts, bundled insurance and spare-part stocks that no single business can negotiate or afford.
The shared centre would be the legal owner of robots, pooling liability and employing necessary technicians, regulated by the regional government or placed directly under national (ministerial) oversight. Public funding could be provided to the owner in order to buy and set up the necessary automation infrastructure to meet the needs of a given area, as well as to local businesses in order to pay their subscription. Governments should focus on facilitating such funds for agriculture and tourism dense regions, where the potential for automation is highest, rather than attempting more comprehensive implementation. National and European calls to projects would earmark public funding for rental or subscription fees, buying robots for a shared regional pool, vehicles and workshops that service several users, insurance bundles, and training of local technicians (integrators, AI/vision engineers, maintenance technicians, safety specialists, software adaptation and compliance with privacy laws).
This already broadly fits under existing structures, such as the European Commission’s Digital Europe Program and its “Smart Specialization Hubs.” If support for the principle and wider Remigration agenda were secured in the European Parliament, Digital Europe Program funds could be earmarked for the administrative cost of these centres and for the acquisition of robots to be used widely by automatable businesses within a given region. And were this framework to be harnessed by EU Member States implementing the Automation First principle, existing Smart Specialization Objectives (which have been drafted by every regional government of the EU) would also have to be revised to prioritize automation where they don’t already.
Funding could divide costs into a “cascading” structure, the way some Horizon Europe projects do: setting up of a shared centre and actual robot acquisition would receive a larger share of funding, subsequent to which local managers could allocate a smaller share of funds to run their own open call for nearby businesses to access the shared centre’s software and robots and receive training for staff in their use.
Where shared centres rent robots and software to local businesses, there should be a buy-in option for those businesses to become co-owners of the shared centres. The shared centre may be thought of as a library/garage of co-owned robots and software and should be sector-specific or split into sector-specific sections. In the case of hospitality, for example the shared centre might store a fleet of serving/cleaning/laundry-transport robots local businesses can take based on demand/reservations, and trained staff able to transport and install these, update software, train local businesses using the units, scan their buildings, set safety parameters for robots on-site, swap damaged units, and so on. Different economic sectors will work differently in terms of how long a machine stays in one business premises, what level of seasonal fluctuation in use there is, and so on (hospitality experiences seasonal demand fluctuations, as compared to care homes, for example).
It would be up to each shared centre to figure out logistics/scheduling optimisation of mobile fleets (“co-designed” by participating businesses, per the usual jargon). General rules would be made more specific at the local-level based on what actually works over time and I imagine best practices emerging over the years resulting in sector-specific manuals, as well as model contracts for renters and co-owners to be copied and adapted elsewhere. This roughly follows the Japanese experience, where ministerial guidelines for automation were eventually followed by industry-specific manuals. In terms of implementation and gaining necessary political capital, pilot projects could provide proof that a given cluster of tasks can indeed be automated under existing conditions (what energy/infrastructure commitment is needed, economic impact, ease of compliance on liability/insurance, conformity with cybersecurity/privacy and environmental standards, and so on). Political parties that support Remigration can facilitate these sorts of pilot projects at the regional level, even supposing they win a regional election but are not in national government. Visible results from such pilot projects can be used in political messaging and be imitated elsewhere.4
Importantly, however, financing shared centres for small and medium businesses does not mean grants for larger businesses to purchase automaton equipment for their exclusive use should not also be facilitated. In addition, there should be across-the-board incentives in place, so that, for example, at the national level, governments allow firms to deduct extra robotisation costs from their taxes (whether purchase or lease, as well as staff training costs), as is apparently already the case in Poland. EU grant rules should likewise allow for tax relief in this context. Whether for a private business or a public centre, the purchase of automation infrastructure to establish a shared fleet able to service a regional economy should be incentivised by being treated as fully and preferentially eligible for public co-financing, subject to tax deductibility, and so on."
(https://europos.substack.com/p/automation-first-making-remigration)
Carlos Perona:
"Shared centres co-owned by local businesses could still operate as private rental firm for outside businesses. In fact, this would make them more financially self-sustaining and would benefit the local economy, as firms move from lease-paying participants to co-owners and acquire a claim on residual value and on surplus rental income from non-owners/non-coop members. In addition, technician, operator, safety and other jobs created at the centre valorise that local economy.
Automation infrastructure, including of robots and software, thus becomes a local commons, not a remote platform extracting subscription fees from the local economy. We reinvent the commons, in a sense, and connect local identity to local property-owning enfranchisement even as we transition away from our addiction to importing foreign labour, with its identity-corroding effects. The principle according to which to be a member of a community must entail being a co-owner of that community (which I have explored elsewhere in Towards an Embodied Citizenship) finds a modern expression, one which naturally distributes the wealth created by automation in a given sector and region among locals organically connected to it (without need of centralized government tax-and-redistribution).
Another expression of this principle, of course, involves that other great technological advancement of our age, A.I., which should be open-source, fragmented, and re-trained on national and personal data, able to run offline on affordable hardware, rather than as a centralized subscription service owned by a foreign Cloud-capitalist class (see my essay Algorithms and Egregores). The same argument applies to large Cloud platforms in general, which, at present, suck liquidity out of the national economy even as their use becomes ubiquitous and indispensable for many businesses (see Big Tech’s Parasite Class).
Apart from reducing reliance on migrant labour, then, automation ought to ultimately increase local purchasing power in precisely those (rural and tourism-dependent) regions where investment in advanced infrastructure and technology tends to lag, that is, rural and tourism dependant regions, as well as in urban centres. In terms of political messaging, this marries immigration restrictionism to that ever-more prominent concern over wage stagnation and rising tide of economic populism. Identity not merely as what excludes others, but as what includes you.
As a conscious return to once widespread communal property arrangements, these initiatives express a recurring yearning in the collective political imagination: the desire to return to past forms in new ways. “Archeo-futurism,” the Japanese communist thinker Kojin Karatani’s “Mode D,” the “neo-retro,” and so on. As such, they should pay close attention to what features made land and infrastructure commons sustainable over the generations. Perhaps the most exhaustive study of this was carried out by Elinor Ostrom in her “Governing the Commons,” who identified several design principles, among which is the need for a clear in-group/out-group distinction: Only members of a community should have access to community property and enjoy a say in it how that property is managed. It is also the case that generational rootedness and common descent generally predict attachment. Here, identity and concern for demographic security meet the concern for widespread and communal ownership.
“Automation First” serves as a tangible policy expressing the principle that to be a member of a community (including a nation) should entail owning a piece of it: technological advancement or economic forces do not shape human community and remake our identities, but are subordinated and integrated into these identities."
(https://europos.substack.com/p/automation-first-making-remigration)